Friday, July 25, 2014

In the late winter
of 2013, skiing in the Arboretum on a morning of fresh snow and dull pewter
clouds, I fell at the bottom of small hill where the trail makes a sharp turn
to the right. I slid off the path and into the woods, and when I came to a stop
I was impaled on a pointed stick. Miraculously, no arteries or organs were
punctured and little blood was lost. The stick punctured my scrotum on the
right side and slid through the fatty layer between muscle and flesh. It ripped
out a piece of my blue jeans the size of a playing card and jammed it twelve
inches deep under my ribs on the left side. After he had extracted it with his
longest instrument through the puncture wound in my scrotum, the flabbergasted
surgeon snapped a photograph of the bloody square of denim with his cellphone. That
night, through a fog of dilaudid, I was aware of the nurses coming in and out
to change the dressings on my sutured wound and marvel at the fact that I was
still alive.

I recovered slowly
at home, on a regular rotation of painkillers, stretched out in bed for most of
two weeks. To pass the time, I read Sarah Bakewell’s How to Live; or A Life of Montaigne.

Montaigne was a
man who understood pain. The writing of the essays seems to some extent to have
been a response to pain and loss—to the death of his friend La Boétie, to the
death of his father, to the riding accident in which he nearly lost his own
life. He tells the story of the accident in an essay in the second book: he was
out riding in the woods about a league from his house when a man on a larger
and more powerful horse, coming along the path behind him, bore down on him at
full speed, threw him from his horse, and knocked him unconscious. His
attendants tried unsuccessfully to revive him and, thinking he was dead,
carried him back to his house. Gradually he began to regain consciousness, and
to cough up prodigious amounts of blood, but for a long time he was “much
closer to death than to life.”

“It seemed to me,”
he writes, “that my life was hanging only by the tip of my lips; I closed my
eyes in order, it seemed to me, to help push it out, and took pleasure in
growing languid and letting myself go.”

The experience, he
said, reconciled him somewhat to the idea of death. He found that borderland
between life and death “very pleasant and peaceful,” and it was only later, as
his condition began to improve, that he was conscious of any pain.

“I was letting
myself slip away so gently, so gradually and easily,” he writes, “that I hardly
ever did anything with less of a feeling of effort.”

Unlike Montaigne,
I never lost consciousness. I don’t remember much pain, but I remember the
initial feeling of panic as I looked down at the bloody hole in my blue jeans,
and as I tried unsuccessfully to move from the spot where I had fallen. I lay
in the snow for three quarters of an hour waiting for an ambulance, shivering,
looking up at the pewter-colored clouds. One of the women who had found me sat
down in the snow and held my head in her lap. I can’t remember her face. When the
rescue crew arrived, was lifted onto a sled, strapped to the back of an ATV, and
hauled out to the highway where the ambulance was waiting. Inside the
ambulance, the medics cut me out of my clothes, gave me a tetanus shot, started
an IV. I never lost consciousness, but as the two female medics examined the
ragged puncture wound in my scrotum, I lost self-consciousness. In the
emergency room, doctors and nurses crowded around me. Never had my private
parts been the object of so much scrutiny.

“I expose myself entire,” Montaigne writes.
“My portrait is a cadaver on which the veins, the muscles, and the tendons
appear at a glance, each part in its place.”

Montaigne writes
his body onto the page, he makes himself physically present, he exposes himself
kidneys, bowels and all. His self-portrait as cadaver made me think of Frida Kahlo, another self-vivisectionist
who made art out of accident.

On September 17,
1925, eighteen-year old Kahlo was riding on a bus that collided with an
electric streetcar. The bus broke apart, and the streetcar ran over several of
the passengers who were thrown from the wreckage.Kahlo’s spinal column, collarbone, pelvis,
and several ribs were broken. Her right foot was crushed. A metal handrail from
the bus pierced her abdomen. She claimed that the iron rod had entered her body
through her left hip and exited through her vagina.She would never fully recover from the
accident. Scar tissue on her uterus from the puncture wound made it impossible
for her to bring a pregnancy to term, and for the rest of her life she suffered
from chronic pain.

In Kahlo’s
self-portrait The Broken Column, her
body is split open down the middle, revealing a shattered Ionic column in place
of her spine. Her flesh is pierced with nails. In the words of art critic
Matilda Bathurst, “Kahlo’s paintings are notoriously introspective, contracted
into tiny, torturous anatomies of selfhood in a range of media that act as
different implements of dissection.” In another painting, the double
self-portrait The Two Fridas, she
sits holding hands with herself, her heart cut open and exposed on her chest, a
surgical instrument in one of her hands.

Kahlo began her career
as an artist in her hospital bed, confined to a full body cast. She was set up
with an easel and a mirror.Pain and
brokenness focused her attention intensely on herself.

I visited the
Frida Kahlo exhibit at the Walker Art Center in December 2007. The dense tropical
foliage and ripe fruit that fill her canvases created a hothouse atmosphere in
the middle of the Minnesota winter, Kahlo’s stare from every wall as unrelenting
as heat. Her pain was inescapable.

Another visitor at
the Kahlo exhibit at the Walker was a young writer named Jen
Westmoreland Bouchard, who gravitated immediately to a painting titled Henry Ford Hospital, in which Kahlo lies
on a hospital bed after a miscarriage, the sheets bloodied, the bed surrounded
by emblems of the experience. For Westmoreland Bouchard, the impact of the
painting was profound and cathartic.

“My heart pounded,
my eyes welled up,” she wrote of the experience. “I began to grieve for lost
opportunities, deceased family and friends, failed projects, unspoken words. I
had never miscarried, so why should this painting feel so real to me, so
fitting?”

As she reflected
on the experience, Westmoreland Bouchard found that her encounter with Kahlo’s
art had refocused her attention on herself.

“I had become
caught up in the daily rituals associated with attending to my marriage, my
home, and my career,” she wrote. “I had begun to exist on a certain emotional
‘level’ that had allowed me to complete quotidian tasks without much
introspection. Unbeknownst to me, I needed to experience Frida’s intensely
personal portrait in order to live more fully in my own life.”

The poet finds herself in the
museum gift shop, surrounded by plastic skulls and temporary Frida Kahlo
tattoos, Kahlo’s suffering repackaged as kitsch, and announces that she’s “had
enough of the disposable.” What can she take away from the museum, from the
encounter with Frida Kahlo’s art, other than some mass-produced Kahlo
tchotchke? Like Westmoreland Bouchard, Agodon turns from the heightened
experience of Kahlo’s art to an examination of ordinary life:

Look
at our lives.

We’re
lost in a web

of
logins, in photos

of
a friend’s family vacation.

I
never remember all my passwords.

Parts of the poet’s own life are
inaccessible to her—she can’t remember the passwords—and she finds herself lost
in attention and obligation to others: to friends, to husband, to children.

How can a woman,
who finds herself caught in a web of so many obligations, find the time and
energy to express herself? In “Woman Under Glass,” a poem in the final section
of Hourglass Museum, Agodon observes:

Normal mothers make
breakfast

and
aren’t trying to write poems that question

the consequences of art and creativity.

The pressure to be a “normal
mother” to her children pulls against her need to write poetry. That tension
becomes the subject of her poetry.Another poem, “Writing Studio D: Retrospective in Spring,” finds the
poet preparing to drive home from a writing retreat to attend an Easter egg
hunt with her daughter. She reflects on the expectations and double standards
that attend her life as a mother:

This is where a friend says, It’s so nice

your husband can watch your
daughter,

as if he’s not related to her, as
if he’s not

responsible
for her care...

While her husband
“gets points just for showing up,” she as a mother is expected to shoulder the
primary responsibility for raising her children. Before she can make art, she
has to make time. As a result, Agodon’s poems have the feel of being assembled
from fragments, from scraps of inspiration saved from ordinary life and
reassembled into art.

In another poem
inspired by Kahlo, “Frida Kahlo
Tattoo.” the poet walks through a museum wearing a temporary Frida Kahlo
tattoo, knowing that the experience of having Kahlo next to her skin will
eventually rub off.In everyday life,
“apathy becomes less rare.”We return to
the “emotional level” that Westmoreland Bouchard talks about. But Frida Kahlo
provides a model of a woman’s life devoted to art. A life that becomes art.

Unlike a real
tattoo, which pricks the skin with permanent color, Agodon's temporary Kahlo
tattoo was painless. How is it possible to experience such intensity, and make
it a permanent source of inspiration, as the pain of her accident was for Kahlo? Can we live creative a creative life intentionally, or only by accident?

In her essay “Necessary
Luxuries: On Writing, Napping, and Letting Go,” Agodon writes about the
importance of withdrawing for a time from ordinary life to participate in
writing retreats with other women, where the focus is on living a full and
creative life without the pressure of those other obligations. She writes:

Here, on a cliff in a cabin with two
other women, I let go of my fears. I let go of any belief that I should be
doing something else with my life. Poems move me in and out of hours, a day is
spent under pages of a manuscript. I live simply and fulfilled without all the
other minutiae of my regular life swirling around me. My friends and I discuss
what matters to us. We ask questions about how we can live better and how we
can take this “retreat lifestyle” home with us when we return.

Agodon’s essay makes me think of of
Jen Westmoreland Bouchard coming out of the Frida Kahlo exhibit, feeling a
revitalizing burst of creative energy that lifted the burden of “quotidian
tasks” from her shoulders. The question Agodon asks is how we store that
creative energy, how we bring it home from the museum or the writing retreat
and continue to draw from it in our ordinary lives.

1 comment:

In searching for another poem of mine in Hourglass Museum, I found your most insightful post on my poems. Thank you. You are truly one of the most thoughtful readers and definitely see the connections betweens my poems, Frida, fragments, life, and being a woman/mother/poet in the world.

I wish I had seen this earlier so I could thank you for such a thoughtful response to my work. Grateful to find this today.Thank you,